Bind Yourself to Your Plan

Plan your work, then work your plan. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to maintain the discipline to do the second part of this. Address the problem by staying sensitive to what gear you are in.

• Open minds. Here’s where you welcome all sorts of input, realizing it’s always easier to tame down an unrealistic idea than to try to make the same old ideas exciting. This stage calls upon your creativity and teamwork talents. Don’t expect yourself to be working your plan here because the plan is not yet fully formed.
• Open roads. This is the “work your plan” implementation stage. You cut back on the brainstorming, critically evaluate what you’ve got, develop your plan based on what’s most likely to work for the long-term, and move ahead decisively. It is a stage of determined action.
• Open wounds. You hope to minimize use of this gear, but inevitably, there will be times the bad news floods in so fast that you must take immediate steps. You might ask others for ideas, but your focus is on short-term bandages. Understandably, you’ll deviate from your original plan until the crisis is resolved.

     A New Yorker feature piece analyzed a big reason we don’t keep on top of working our plan—procrastination. Procrastination is discussed there as a matter of the divided self, which in the terms I’ve used is the struggle our open minds gear mounts against our open roads gear.
     A solution is to bind ourselves to our task. The New Yorker piece dramatizes this point by discussing how in The Odyssey, Ulysses avoids the temptation of the Sirens by having his crew bind him to the mast so that he won’t deviate from his intended route when he hears the Sirens’ calls. Beyond that, Ulysses orders his seamen to stuff their ears with wax, which they are to keep there until the craft had passed the Sirens’ island.
     Ensuring that our crew helps us stick to the plan is a good idea. However, there’s a danger in preventing all our people and ourselves from sensing distractions that should legitimately lead to us deviating from our previous intentions. The life of a retailer is filled with the unpredictable.
     Bind yourself to your plan. At the same time, make provision for monitoring developments and responding to crises. That’s wisdom, not procrastination.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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